


Purchase

by SylvanWitch



Category: Spartacus: Vengeance
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-24
Updated: 2012-08-24
Packaged: 2017-11-12 18:44:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/494451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some things can never be bought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Purchase

**Author's Note:**

> There are vague spoilers for "A Place in This World" herein.

When he was small, he was allowed free run of the market.  Barefooted, clean of limb and swift as the rare clouds over the desert, Nasir had slipped between wheel and wall, beneath the cloth skirts of stalls, into the darkened doorways of dwellings, sometimes chased, sometimes chasing, never caught by the fact that he wasn’t really free.

 

He’d only felt free then because he didn’t yet know—hadn’t yet been taught—the meaning of captivity.

 

The bazaar had been abandoned to lessons he reluctantly undertook, Nasheem’s watchful eye and admonishing hands instructing him in balance and grace and a thousand ways to look without looking.  If Nasir had considered what the lessons meant, he doesn’t remember now; he only recalls the steady drone of Nasheem’s corrections and the simple act of breathing in, breathing out, making of his every movement an offering.

 

Nasir didn’t learn what his body was being taught to say until he was sold to a Roman household, where he fell first under the indifferent care of Dullah, who ruled the villa like he didn’t himself wear the ubiquitous collar.  Dullah showed him to the slave’s bath, gave him scents and scraper, said, “Make yourself ready,” as though Nasir should already know his place.

 

Had he suspected that place was beneath the master of the house, whose rutting grunts punctuated every tearing thrust, he might have swallowed the perfume or slit his wrists with the dullish edge of the scraper—anything to be free from the weight of what he’d been made into.

 

Nasir lost track of himself in that household, which echoed with the impressions of other misery, older crimes.  There was a stain above the pallet in his narrow cell that looked like a spread hand, as though its owner had tried to leave a mark of memory in the stone, to say, “I have been.  I was.” 

 

Nasir didn’t want to be remembered.

 

Of course, he’d grown accustomed to his place, had even learned that love wasn’t always a violation.  Kept apart from the others by his use, Nasir grew good at watching what none had meant for him to see.  He’d seen the way Sylene in the kitchen looked at Dullah, the way Dullah’s eyes lingered on the curve of her back as she scurried away from the table.  He’d witnessed the forbidden touches:  a hand at the nape of a sweat-damp neck, a brush of hip to hip in a dark hall.

 

He made no equation between those clandestine evidences and his own household role.  Nothing the master did to him, even when deep in his wine and slurring specious words over Nasir’s bowed back, made any difference to Nasir’s heart, which had stopped beating the day he’d first been bent over a table and made to suffer for his training.

 

Still, he felt some kinship with the others of his kind in the house, those abused by the master’s monstrous will whenever they failed to do something just as he’d ordered it, which was often.  All of them had scars, though Nasir’s were inside, where none but the most observant might find them.  And usually, no one looked, turned too far inward to preserve what was left of their own meager selves.

 

By the time the rebels came, almost nothing was left of the boy who’d run through the bazaar, laughing, the sky open above him, the packed earth beneath his feet promising eternal room to race.  And because he’d forgotten what it meant to be himself, apart from what another had made of him, he’d tried to defend his home, continued trying long after the cause was lost.

 

Spartacus’ words when he’d finally surrendered meant nothing.  What was freedom?  How could he be a man for himself when all he’d ever been was someone else’s boy?

 

Only after he’d been caught in his assassination attempt, only after he’d seen a look flicker through Agron’s eyes, had Nasir begun to understand that there might be hope, an emotion so foreign to him that he couldn’t name it and it clogged his throat and caught his tongue.  In Agron’s eyes Nasir saw again the boy he’d been, something of beauty that had nothing to do with its uses.

 

So Nasir had submitted, hoping it didn’t mean bending again to another’s awful appetites.

 

Never had he expected to want to be taken, to willingly spread himself beneath another’s pinning weight.

 

Nothing in his experience had prepared him for the way it felt to be filled like this, face to face with bright, wide eyes and a smiling mouth, the wonder on Agron’s face mirroring what Nasir himself felt.

 

He wasn’t trapped but treasured, centered and held in place by hands that stroked his cheek, his throat, hands that skated between their heaving bodies and wrapped around him, stroking with perfect pressure in time to their mutual movements. 

 

He couldn’t help the sound he made when he came, a cry that spoke more of revelation than completion, and Agron stilled within him, trembling arms betraying the effort, and said, “Is it good?  Are you well?”

 

“Yes,” he answered, leaning up to kiss the beloved mouth, murmuring words against Agron’s gusting breath, snatching them back as his lover came undone and spilled into him moments later.

 

“Yes,” he said again, much later, when Agron asked him if he would go with him into the city and walk among the stalls, help him purchase many much-needed things for their people. 

 

If Agron found Nasir’s laugh strangely out of place for such a pedestrian errand, he did not say, and when they approached the market and Nasir began to run, Agron laughed, too, to see his beloved so free.

 

 


End file.
